The Waves

Mexican Summer; 2010

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Tamaryn will surely get tagged as shoegaze even though The Waves has a thousand-yard stare.Its definitive characteristic is how vast it sounds: similar to My Morning Jacket's At Dawn, its plush, reverberating production is undoubtedly suited for headphones, but it has an expansive quality where it sounds like it could fill any space you put it in.

Husky but airy feminine vocals and blown-out guitar comes with a slate of readymade comparisons, and yet, it's Mazzy Star that I keep coming back to for Tamaryn.Though performed and produced in its entirety by Tamaryn and Rex John Shelverton, The Waves sounds like the product of a straight-up rock band, and in particular, it's the low-end that Shelverton provides that gives it a full-bodied physicality.On the title track, Tamaryn portrays a watery grave as something of a seductive allure, while the churning undertow of the bass drags you in.Meanwhile, "Mild Confusion" is one of the several times Tamaryn claims she uses her experience working in a psychiatrist's office as inspiration, and the stately guitars aim for a clarity its narrator so desperately seeks.

"Choirs of Winter" and "Haze Interior" slow The Waves down to a crawl, but even then, there's a heat rising off them.The former sounds like a victim of sunstroke if anything, while the latter is almost like a power trio undergoing the Disintegration Loops treatment, a four-minute decay that sounds like it's fading out from the moment it starts.While The Waves is often split between upbeat and dirgy tempos, when the two meet on "Sandstone", the results are epic.It's equal parts grit and vapor, a guitar sample volleying back and forth as every instrument twists in the wind.

The Waves is a confident debut in part because the group seems like it's thought through what it does.Tamaryn namedrop the exact influences you'd expect of them in interviews, the song titles are often literal descriptors, and even if the picture of Tamaryn striking and solitary in a desert landscape was placed within a pack of a thousand other images, you'd surely pick that one as being the most likely thing to be the album cover.The Waves is perfectly comfortable within its set of sonic parameters, and while that might be a concern in the future, the albumshows a band mastering a very specified sound on its first try.